Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16872 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Sir Trevor Nunn, Independent Sir Trevor Nunn, Indepedent
'Pretty terrific'

Allan Massie, Scotsman
'Evidence of Faulks's remarkable empathy and mastery of the
novelist's art... Compelling, disturbing and significant... A remarkable
achievement'

Mail on Sunday
`Engleby contains much of brilliance; Faulks turns out to be an unnervingly good ventriloquist... and a born thriller writer.'

Customer Reviews

A hauntingly real character
There is very little to criticise about this novel. The whole book pivots around the complex and disturbing central character, Mike Engleby, and his reaction to the mysterious disappearence of his university "friend", Jennifer. The subsequent account of his life details his attempts to fit into life in the seventies and eighties, as the police investigation attempts to discover Jennifer's fate.
Engleby is a novel which shouldn't be read as a murder mystery; instead, read it as a fascinating study of the character and nature of Engleby, an individual so fully formed, yet flawed, as to be completely believable.

The Curious Incident of the Undergraduate in the Night Time
Mike Engleby is a man at one step removed from the world. He is estranged from his violent father, a working class boy at a minor public school, a self contained student at Cambridge and a journalist who shuns the company of his colleagues.

Central to the story of his life, about which we learn through his diaries, is Jennifer, a lively and attractive student whom he admires, also at one step removed. Her disappearance and its subsequent effects on Mike's life are the core strands of this dark, touching and intriguing novel.

Mike is an engaging but troubling companion to his own life. Faulks gives us a character who could be an innocent thrust alone into a world he hasn't the skills to understand, or could be a disturbingly creepy stalker. Or maybe both. In some ways his voice resembles that of the narrator of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" in its elliptical, unemotional and disconnected tone.

Engleby has much in common with Faulks' earlier "Human Traces" in its use of mental illness to explore themes of humanity and reality.

While writing a bleak, unsettling and eventually tragic novel, Faulks is also playful and entertaining in his structuring of Mike Engleby's story.

So, is it any good ? Yes, absolutely. It is very black, it is not a comfortable book, but it is beautifully written, highly intelligent and very moving. It is certainly his best since Birdsong and maybe even surpasses it.

Very definitely recommended.

Creepy and yet compassionate
My wife and daughter both read this and recommended to me, with some muttering about how I'd "get" more of the allusions to 70's music. They were right, but the fact that the allusions were being made by such a disturbing person made me wonder whether I shared any other traits with Mike Engleby. It's that sort of book, where you find yourself thinking about the characters after you've put it down. At first, this is because Engleby seems to be a classic example of the unreliable narrator (I was initially reminded of the lonely Frederick Clegg and his obsession with Miranda Grey in John Fowles's "The Collector"), so you spend a lot of the time while reading his story trying to work out what's really going on. This isn't too taxing - indeed, when the central incident of the plot occurs on p86, it's pretty easy to see past Engleby's account and guess what's happened.

But Faulks works hard to make him into more than just a creep with something of a fixation on music - although I found myself involuntarially nodding in agreement when he passed Focus's "Moving Waves" onto a friend with a note giving the locations of the most "sublime moments", and when he puzzled out a mondegreen in Steely Dan's "Brooklyn" as a diversion from feeling nervous before a party. Instead, he gives him moments of penetrating insight and wry humour, often expressed in pithy - even poetic - asides. The most memorable of these comes on p155, where he suggests that, although time really is non-linear (which allows new possibilities for occupying it), our brains can only think of it as linear (which dooms us into thinking that our lives are pointless). He thinks that this inability to grasp one of the dimensions we inhabit makes us like deaf musicians - playing the music without hearing it. This is thought-provoking stuff, and all the more remarkable when you think about all the other things that Engleby has been doing.

Thinking about those other things seems to make it unlikely that you could feel pity, or compassion, or regret for Engleby. And yet, by the end of this book (which finishes with a heart-wrenching passage that cuts right back to that central incident), that's what I was feeling, which is a testimony to the technical skill of the author, and the way in which this extraordinary story resonates in your head.